The Lost Estate by Henri Alain-Fournier Read Free Book Online Page A

put on… The room was very dark, without even the glimmer of light that you sometimes get with snow. An icy, dark wind was blowing in the dead garden and across the roof.
    I sat up and said, softly, ‘Meaulnes! Are you off again?’
    He did not answer; so, quite distraught, I went on: ‘Right,then, I’m coming with you. You must take me.’ And I jumped down from my bed.
    He came over, took my arm and, forcing me to sit on the edge of the bed, he told me, ‘I can’t take you, François. If I knew the way properly, you could come with me, but first of all I have to find it myself on the map, or I won’t get there.’
    ‘So you can’t go either?’
    ‘That’s right, it’s no use,’ he said, dejectedly. ‘Come on, go back to bed. I promise not to go without you.’
    He started to walk up and down the room again. I didn’t dare say anything. He would walk, then stop, then set off again faster, like someone looking for memories or going over them in his head, comparing and contrasting, calculating, then suddenly thinking he has the solution… Then, once more, he loses the thread and starts looking again…
    This was not the only night when, woken by the sound of his footsteps, I found him like that, walking up and down the room and the attics at around one o’clock in the morning – like those sailors who cannot get used to not doing the night watch and who, in their houses in Brittany, get up and dress at the appointed hour to go and keep watch over the night on shore.
    Two or three times, in this way, in January and the first fortnight of February, I was woken from sleep. The Great Meaulnes was there, upright, fully equipped, his cape over his shoulders, ready to leave; and every time, on the frontier of this mysterious country into which he had already once escaped, he paused, hesitating… Just as he was about to lift the latch of the door to the stairs and slip out through the kitchen door (which he could have opened easily without my hearing), he shrank back once more… Then through the long hours in the middle of the night, he would stride feverishly through the abandoned attics, racking his brains.
    Finally, one night, around 15 February, he decided to wake me himself by gently putting a hand on my shoulder.
    It had been a day of upsets. Meaulnes, who had entirely abandoned all the games of his former friends, had spent histime during the last break of the day sitting on a bench, entirely absorbed in drawing up some mysterious little plan by following a route, and making long calculations, on a map of the département of Cher. There was constant coming and going between the yard and the classroom. Clogs clattered and boys chased each other around from one table to the next, leaping over the benches and the master’s platform in a single jump… They knew that it was not a good idea to go up to Meaulnes when he was working like that, yet towards the end of the recreation, two or three village lads crept up to him as a dare and looked over his shoulder. One of them was reckless enough to push the others on to Meaulnes. He slammed his atlas shut, hid his sheet of paper and grabbed hold of the last of the three lads while the other two managed to get away.
    The unlucky one was the fractious Giraudat, who started to whine, tried to kick and was finally thrown out by The Great Meaulnes, shouting furiously, ‘You big coward! I’m not surprised they’re all against you and want to pick a fight with you!’ And then a shower of insults, to which we responded, without exactly knowing what he had been trying to say. I was the one who shouted loudest, because I had taken Meaulnes’ side; from now on, there was a sort of pact between us. His promise to take me with him, without telling me as everyone else did that ‘I wasn’t up to walking’, had bound me to him for ever. I was constantly thinking about his mysterious journey and had convinced myself that he must have met a girl. Of course, she would be